Long Division

Kiese Laymon is a Black American author from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon spent his childhood and adolescence in the American South with his mother, who instilled in him a deep love of reading and writing. However, Laymon’s childhood family and home life were often fraught and have been the subject matter of many of his autobiographical essays, as well as his 2018 memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir. These aspects of Laymon’s childhood also parallel the primary subject matter of his debut novel Long Division. The novel is a coming-of-age story set in Jackson, Mississippi, and many of its protagonist’s struggles with his body, anxiety, and familial relationships mirror Laymon’s childhood experiences.

Laymon’s entry into the literary world was complex and meandering. Laymon began writing for the school newspaper while he was pursuing his undergraduate degree at Jackson State University; however, the university president, George Harmon, deemed Laymon’s treatment of race and other topics too “controversial” (Laymon, Kiese. “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance.” Gawker, 28 July 2012). This discouragement didn’t end Laymon’s writing career but rather fueled his later essay “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” which was published in Gawker magazine. This standalone essay inspired Laymon’s autobiographical essay collection of the same name, which received both accolades and criticism from the publishing world for its forthright explorations of race, fatness, and abuse.

However, Laymon’s publication of Long Division, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and Heavy would also earn him respect in the literary community. In 2022, he began teaching English and creative writing at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and also received a MacArthur Fellowship. He has founded “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program “aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their own terms, in their own communities” (“About.” Kiese Laymon). Furthermore, Laymon has won numerous awards for his fiction and nonfiction writing. Almost 10 years after its publication, Long Division won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction. Heavy has been awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, and the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media; it was also named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America has received similar accolades.

Laymon’s academic and social contributions mirror his literary explorations of the African American experience. His work is in conversation with other contemporary Black American writers, including Percival Everett and Paul Beatty. Like Everett and Beatty, Laymon incorporates the historical, the mystical, and the humorous into his examinations of Black history and culture. His linguistic experimentation and subversive play with narrative convention both excavate and enact the ongoing complexities of being Black in America.